Dreamy pictures, earthly selves

My Mirror column:

Made in Heaven fails in the Delhi authenticity department, but there's some promise in its protagonists' struggles to embrace themselves. 

(The second of a two-part column. The first part is here.)

Last week, I suggested that Made in Heaven is a posh update on Band Baaja Baaraat, with a nostalgic dollop of Monsoon Wedding (MW) feels. MIH's creators actually rejig certain specifics from Mira Nair's 2001 film: MW's child-molesting uncle is transformed into a teen-molesting father-in-law, and at least two actors re-appear. There is the tragically underused Kamini Khanna, making the most of her minutes as a memorable aunty in 2001 and in 2019, and in a much larger part, Vijay Raaz: then playing a hangdog tentwala besotted with the pretty family maid, now appearing as the wry, edge-of-dangerous Johari, a plumber with a plan.

More than any of these things, though, what's common to MW and MIH is the use of English as the primary language. By which I mean it is the language in which this world is imagined, and the language primarily spoken by most characters, sometimes even when a character's social background can't carry it off: witness Vinay Pathak talking of unscented soap. Conversely characters who speak in Hindi or Punjabi often sound excessive: witness Tara hissing at her sister at the opening of her husband Adil's new factory: “Naali ki kutti ki tarah baat mat karo”.

Band Baaja Baaraat knew the Delhis into which it shepherded us. MIH doesn't. So wedding after wedding feels like a PR video seen from the objectifying distance of Bombay – a tastefully well-off older couple get an old haveli setting, an organic-seeking IAS groom gets a trip to Dastkar Haat, a poor Muslim bride gets a rooftop sangeet. A character like Jassi/Jazz is interesting in theory – the Dwarka girl doing South Delhi – and she gets a couple of great moments, like when she shows up in a blingy dress for Kabir's ultra-dressed-down house party. But most of the time MIH can't pull off Jassi's in-between-ness – her clandestine liaisons with a motor mechanic are even more unconvincing than her desire for Kabir. The dialogue verbalises things in a way no-one living it ever would. For example, no Delhi person, no matter how rich, would use the word “vernac”.

So is MIH still worth watching? I'd say yes, for the riskiness of its central characters. MIH is rare in this regard – and not only because Karan is gay and Tara is married. When we first meet Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), we're primed to empathise with her, perhaps because she's trying to make it as a businesswoman, and her rich industrialist in-laws don't seem to trust her or her acumen. Ditto for Karan (Arjun Mathur), who seems to have a domineering father and not-so-nice friends who bring up his all-too-real money troubles at inopportune moments.

But as the series progresses, we learn new things about both. Karan's backstory focuses on his sexuality. He is a gay man who's out to his friends and colleagues, but still straight at the family dinner table. His dating life, which seems to frequently begin at The Piano Man and end in bed at his rather nice barsati apartment, must be conducted away from the prying eyes of landlords and policemen alike. But if the forced secrecy of Karan's life presents him to us as a victim, MIH also successfully complicates our perspective by showing us someone Karan once victimised. (This happens with other characters, too – turning their victimhood or villainy upside down – and it might be the best thing about the way the show is written.)

Tara's backstory is even more interesting. On the surface, it's about class – she's the good-looking girl who managed to marry the boss. But it is also, quite vividly, about her sexuality. If sex is Karan's Achilles' heel, it is Tara's secret weapon. The flashbacks that trace Tara's relationship with Adil (a very sexy Jim Sarbh) are among MIH's most interestingly crafted sections, with Dhulipala turning in a fascinating performance as a woman aware that her sexiness is her most monetisable asset – but also realising that it isn't a stable one.

Karan and Tara's problems don't seem comparable at all. And yet, as the series progresses, for both the question of selfhood emerges as the crux. Karan has hidden his inner self so long that he doesn't quite know what life outside the closet might entail. Tara has polished her exterior so successfully that she fears she may have rubbed herself out.

Some of the show's most ambitious arcs involve a central character recognising themselves in another. Example: Tara is a lot like the first bride we meet in MIH – a journalist marrying a business scion she'd first met to interview. At another level, Tara is a successful version of Jassi: she's successfully transitioned out of her old class. Sometimes a situation allows for unspoken resonance: when an older character I won't name sees himself in Karan, or when Karan seems to identify, unwillingly, with the young girl who thinks a monetary compromise is a better deal than a public battle. 

Sometimes we only see ourselves in the mirror of other people.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Mar 2019.

Heading to the Wedding

My Mirror column:

The new series Made in Heaven is a meaty addition to a genre that has captured our imagination for the last two decades: the big fat Indian shadi. (First of a two-part column)

As I succumbed to social media peer pressure and binge-watched the new web series Made in Heaven this week, I started to wonder when weddings in our movies went from being the all's-well-that-ends-well freeze-frame at the end of all the drama to becoming the locus of the drama. 

The original moment of change, it seems to me, might have been Monsoon Wedding. Mira Nair's 2001 film used an upper middle class Delhi wedding as the setting for a social and familial unravelling. Nair and her screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan unveiled the deep, dark secrets of the Indian family with a frankness that felt shocking at the time – but managed to use the glitter, the banter, the infectious energy of the North Indian wedding as the perfect foil for all the intense stuff.

In retrospect, Monsoon Wedding was the sophisticated prototype of something that would define our era. Among South Asians, a daughter's wedding had always been something to spend on. But a decade after liberalisation, the country's burgeoning middle classes suddenly had more money to spend – and were increasingly unabashed about being seen to spend it. The big fat Indian shadi and the high-gloss, exportable version of Hindi cinema that we call Bollywood arrived in the world more or less together, film and life cross-fertilising each other. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released the same year – 2001. Through the 2000s, aided by Karan Johar and others, the shadi became an essential part of Bollywood – and Bollywood became essential to the shadi. Across regional/linguistic boundaries, in India and in the desi diaspora, a with-it wedding now had to have a choreographed Bollywood sangeet. Across national boundaries, too, the newly performative Bollywood-style wedding established itself as a hegemonic cultural export – as a graduate student in New York in 2004 or so, I had the enjoyably surreal experience of watching my university's Pakistani Students Association stage a Bollywood-style faux-wedding as their big cultural event of the year.

Nearly a decade after Monsoon Wedding, in 2010, came another era-defining wedding movie: Band Baaja Baraat (BBB). Written by Habib Faisal and directed by Maneesh Sharma, BBB was also set in Delhi, but with a much more expansive socio-economic canvas than Monsoon Wedding's elite, English-speaking South Delhi family. BBB opened with Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar (Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma) meeting at a wedding, as so many Hindi movie couples have from Chandni to Saathiya – but then cleverly subverted expectations until at least halfway through, by making them partners not in love but in business. A wedding planning business, to be precise, which let Bittoo and Shruti – and their audience – work their way through a series of different Delhi milieus.

Made in Heaven (MIH) – conceptualised by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and co-written by Alankrita Shrivastava of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame – often feels a cleverly reworked combination of Monsoon Wedding and Band Baaja Baraat (BBB), expanded to series length and set in the present. As in BBB, the protagonists run a wedding planning business, and each wedding they organise gives us a ringside view of a particular Delhi social setting.

Only Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra (Sobhita Dhulipala and Arjun Mathur) move in more moneyed circles than Bittoo and Shruti. And consequently, so do the couples whose weddings they organise. The poshest echelon of golf-playing industrialists and their rummy-playing bitchy wives are straight out of Akhtar's 2015 film Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD), as are the Punjabi-speaking business families one notch down, whom the top tier fraternises with but also scorns. And as in DDD, these jokes at the expense of non-English speakers – a rich aunty saying “twat” instead of “tweet” – often feel like a stretch. Sometimes it’s the placement that's off. I'm not saying the Delhi rich don't mispronounce English words, they do – but if your daughter's marrying their son, you don't correct their pronunciation.

There are other glitches that show up the lack of Delhi detailing by a team of Bombay people who can't be bothered to go beyond visual and class clichés. Sure, this is fiction – but if you're going to say a character lives in Dwarka, then don't show her getting off in Sheikh Sarai, at the other end of Delhi. And definitely don't show her in a home that isn't a DDA flat. Don't give us a Delhi-based character who describes himself on his website as a “Mughal historian” and then responds with baffled surprise to the existence of a late Mughal haveli. Don't bung in a troupe of hijras from a “Fateh Baba Ki Dargah” when there isn't one in the city. As a Delhi person, I rate MIH sadly low on the authenticity scale – a matter I bring up only because every second episode seems to end on a platitude about Delhi delivered by Shashank Arora's video-camera-wielding Kabir – apparently Akhtar's human replacement for Pluto the dog, who delivered them in DDD.

But then what makes Made in Heaven worth watching isn't Delhi. If BBB acquired some cool in 2010 from not making its central pair start romancing immediately, MIH is immeasurably cooler because the couple at its centre are not a romantic couple at all.

The second and concluding part of this column is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Mar 2019.

The dance of anger

My Mirror column:

Ivan Ayr’s film about a Delhi policewoman, now streaming on Netflix, is an astute study of female power and powerlessness.

The members of any oppressed class have two options on the world stage. They can fill the roles they're given, thrill to the indulgent applause that comes their way -- and accept that they will never direct the show. Or they can demand the bigger, better parts, try to change the script -- and risk finding themselves thrown out of the production.

When a system is stacked heavily against you, there are many advantages to be gained from not upsetting the apple cart. Given a bit of power within such a system, most people would play safe. But Soni isn't most people.

At one level, Ivan Ayr's first feature is a finely observed study of what it might feel like to be an ordinary young woman in present-day Delhi — in the streets, at home, in school, at work. But at another level, Ayr's eponymous protagonist is clearly not an ordinary young woman: because she works with the police. Co-written with Kislay (whose short fiction Hamare Ghar was mercilessly astute about our behaviour as middle class employers of domestic help), the film plays constantly on the gap between what Soni appears to be and what she actually is. It begins with Geetika Vidya Ohlyan's physical presence, her body language. When we see the petite figure on the bicycle, cycling as fast as possible through a dark alley, her lips pursed into silence even as her harasser grows increasingly vocal, we imagine the worst. We are primed to imagine a woman on Delhi's streets as a victim. So there is a sense of shock – and perhaps embarrassment – when we realize she isn't one.

And yet, that is by no means the end-point where the film wishes to deposit us. Because what becomes eminently clear is that Soni's unusual position of power – bolstered by her physical training, her job as a law enforcement official, even just her status as a financially independent working woman – does not in fact exempt her from the anxieties of ordinary women. That is true just as much within her closest private relationships – in the heartbreaking sense of feeling abandoned by the man she might have loved – as it is with men in public places. Even the women handling police control hotline are not immune to the unwanted attentions of men.

Ayr and his cinematographer David Bolen do a brilliant job of showing us how a woman walking alone on the Indian street might experience it as an obstacle course, a video game filled with potential dangers. The roads half-blocked by Metro construction, the lack of any pavements to speak of, the rickshaw that drives too close to you, the men huddled around bonfires at street corners, their casually delivered 'behen ke lodey's audible as you approach – these everyday sights and sounds of a Delhi winter night are both perfectly ordinary and possible sources of assault.

The scenes with Soni working as a police decoy have an indescribable intensity. As Soni walks tensely through the streets, her face drained of colour even in the glow of Lohri fires, one feels as if the city turns each woman in it into a decoy, each walk we take is an experiment upon the self. If even pretending to be a victim can be so draining, the filmmakers seem to suggest, can you imagine what it's like to actually be one?

And yet this is not some hopeless, helpless film. One of my favourite moments is when Soni gets out of the police car to get the special chai that the tea stall guy will only make if he knows it's for her. That individual relationship with the city, that claim upon it, is one women deserve to be able to make as much as men – and some day perhaps we won't need to remark upon it.

Soni is also a twin character study, contrasting the hotheadedness of its eponymous heroine against the quieter foil of her boss Kalpana (Saloni Batra). Though also a woman in a male-dominated force, Kalpana has arrived there via a very different route: the Indian civil services examination. That more bookish route is gestured to in Kalpana's rule-bound decision-making; in her attempts to make her subordinates follow the letter of the law – automatically file an FIR when a woman complains of harassment, or call in a woman officer to help question a clearly petrified girl who may or may not have been raped. There is also, of course, a class difference between Soni and Kalpana which might have some impact on their differential levels of self-control, though the film is never so crude as to spell that out.

But what is so fertile about their relationship is that each appreciates the other's characteristics. As the senior officer, Kalpana is constantly having to answer for Soni's outbreaks of uncontrollable anger. But her chastising of Soni seems always to come from a space of understanding. It is as if a part of her would be glad to punch those men herself. Violence isn't the answer, but sometimes it makes the questions visible.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Mar 2019.

‘Modernism not the preserve of the West': Q&A

A short Q&A for India Today, to accompany my recent piece on modern Indian art:

Giles Tillotson, one of the editors of Modern Indian Painting, on how private collectors can give us a different perspective on South Asian art.

Q. What role do private collectors like Jane and Kito de Boer play in the Indian art scene? 

They collect for their own pleasure. The collection reflects their personal taste rather than an academic agenda. But their choices might make us think about modern Indian art differently, seeing it through their eyes. You might see links between A. Ramachandran and Rameshwar Broota, for instance.

Q. Are such collections ever made accessible to a wider public? 

Works from private collections do find their way into public exhibitions. A recent Broota show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art included many works loaned from the de Boer collection. A book like this is also a way of putting the works in the public domain—only in reproduction, but available for research and comparison.

Q. Is India now part of the global reckoning of modern art? Or does the “derivative” tag still cling on? 

It is, and has been for some decades—Christie’s has been promoting modern South Asian art for 40 years or so. Still, it’s much less so than modern Chinese art. The “derivative” tag betrays its own Eurocentrism. If Picasso could draw on African art, why can’t an Indian artist create something that uses and transforms Picasso? What I’m saying is not new. In the 1950s, art historian W.G. Archer had to defend artists like Souza and Avinash Chandra against the charge of not being Indian enough. Modernism is not the preserve of the West.

Published in India Today, 15 Mar 2019.

The Journey of Modern Indian Art

A piece for India Today about the state of modern Indian art, (occasioned by a new book on the subject, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean). 

'Assassin', by the late Ganesh Pyne. (Tempera).

Last week, an “art market intelligence” firm called Artery India announced on its website that India’s ‘Top 3 Artists’ over the last five years are V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza. Husain and Raza, once colleagues in the Progressive Artists’ Group, are running neck and neck, with 494 and 454 works sold for Rs 331 crore and Rs 321 crore respectively. Gaitonde is the dark horse, having totted up Rs 392 crore with just 81 works.

The racecourse metaphor may seem undignified, but it’s also sadly accurate in a country where art is only discussed for its price tag. When Christie’s sells a Tyeb Mehta work for Rs 22.9 crore, or an “unseen” Souza is a Sotheby’s auction highlight (as will happen on March 18 in New York), modern Indian art can provide temporary grist to the national pride mill. Five artists—Raza, Husain, Gaitonde, F.N. Souza and Mehta—account for two-thirds of the top 500 lots sold at auctions. The market’s unrelenting appetite for big names can lead down murkier paths. In February, several works listed for auction by the Neville Tuli-run Osian’s-Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd—an untitled 1957 Souza, Shadow of Death by Bhupen Khakhar, a 1964 Jehangir Sabavala and a 1952 Akbar Padamsee—were charged with being potential fakes.

Kito de Boer and his partner Jane Gowers began collecting modern Indian art 25 years ago during a seven-year sojourn in India. Their collection, now 1000-odd images strong, offers an example of how informed private collectors might depart from such a highly skewed art market. The de Boer collection is now the basis of a new book, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean.

The de Boers' personal tastes sometimes align with the market, for instance on the Bombay Progressives. Yashodhara Dalmia’s essay on them usefully contextualises each artist: e.g. Raza’s move from early cityscapes and representational works, like the arresting Three Artists, to the abstract, ever more luminous oils that he began to make in the 1960s; or Souza’s iconoclasm, including ghoulish depictions of Christian themes and unprecedented sexual imagery. Dalmia includes a great anecdote from artist Krishen Khanna: a woman he once heard muttering “Disgusting, absolutely disgusting”, as she stepped away from a nude self-portrait by Souza.

The late S.H. Raza's 'Three Artists'

The de Boers also display a strong interest in art from Bengal, and because the region has been so crucial to modern Indian art, the book works superbly as an introductory historical survey. Partha Mitter’s essay on the Bengal School explains succinctly how Indian art first became wound up with nationalism. The rise of western art training in colonial India first gave rise to an artist like Raja Ravi Varma, who “used the syntax of Victorian academic art for his ‘authentic’ recreations of the Hindu past”. Varma’s style of portraiture, spread by his printing press, became the new norm in the popular imagination. But, Mitter writes, by the early twentieth century, there was a reaction to western academic art. The Bengal School, under E.B. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore, led a formal movement against western-style three-dimensional illusionism. This included using watercolours rather than oils, and looking East (e.g. to Japan’s colour wash techniques), or to India’s own past (e.g. Ajanta frescoes or Mughal miniatures) for ‘Swadeshi’ form and subjects.

The book illustrates this period with Tagore’s own Bharat Mata and The Passing of Shah Jahan, A.R. Chughtai’s Shah Jahan Looking at the Taj, Kshitindranath Majumdar’s Chaitanya images and, most interesting of all, Prosanto Roy’s works in variegated styles, from Untitled (Arabian Nights) to the Tibetan thangka influences in Mara’s Attack on the Buddha. Tillotson’s essay further amplifies our sense of this early period, illustrating how the Tagore-led Bengal School was challenged, not just by the Bombay School’s portrait painters, like M.V. Dhurandhar and M.F. Pithawalla, but from within Bengal itself. Practitioners in oils like Motilal Pai created ‘realistic’ perspectival architectural settings for epic themes, while the Calcutta Naturalists like Hemendranath Mazumdar, B.C. Law and Satish Sinha focused on naturalistic female figures and landscapes.

Bezwada, by Chittaprosad.

Sona Datta’s essay frames the mid-century change in Bengal’s art as a rural idyll (Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Benod Behari Mukherjee and others at Shantiniketan) disrupted by famine, war and Partition. The standout figure here is Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, whose woodblock prints and ink-on-paper drawings are a scathing commentary on stark times. But Datta also helps explain the darkness of major mid-century Bengali artists, like Nikhil Biswas, Rabin Mondal, Somnath Hore and Prokash Karmakar.

The book ends with three fascinating interviews with living artists: Ganesh Pyne and his unsettling, ghostly temperas, A. Ramachandran’s vegetally embellished re-workings of Indian myths and Rameshwar Broota’s eclectic career that was “never influenced by the watercolours of the Bengal School”. As he says, “I am influenced by universal art.” May all future Indian art be as confident.

Published in India Today, 15 Mar 2019. A brief accompanying interview with Tillotson is here.

Flight into the wild

My Mirror column:

An evocative new film melds classic Western motifs with a vision of the Chambal wilderness, using a gang of 1970s dacoits to ask existential questions

A group of armed men arrive in a village to commit a robbery. They are on foot, their leader using a megaphone to announce who they are (“Je baaghi Maan Singh ko gang haigo”), why they are here, and what they would like the locals to do (the women and children to go indoors, the men to stay where they are). Then they walk into a wedding, round up the guests, and slide into a bag the several glittering gold sets laid out by the local jeweller for his daughter’s dowry. When the father of the bride starts to sink to the ground, Maan Singh sits the tubby little man down and announces that no jewels are to be taken off the bride’s body. Then, with impeccable gravity, he makes his incredulous deputy Vakila (Ranvir Shorey) hand over 101 rupees to the weeping girl.

This scene from Abhishek Chaubey’s Sonchiriya contains much tongue-in-cheek humour: the procession of dacoits that mimics an electoral campaign, the wedding gift delivered earnestly while looting. And Manoj Bajpayee, playing another ‘Maan Singh’ 25 years after his career-inaugurating performance in Bandit Queen, revels in creating characters who can keep us guessing. But Chaubey and his screenwriter Sudeep Sharma (they last collaborated on Udta Punjab) are also using the scene to communicate something that lies at the core of their film: that dakus have a dharam.

That thought isn’t, of course, something spectacularly new. Our memories may have been addled by Sholay overkill, but the uber-villainous Gabbar Singh is really not typical of how dacoits have been popularly seen in India. Pre-colonial bandits like Sultana Daku were immortalised in folk songs and nautankis, and that tradition carried on into Hindi cinema, too: think of Dilip Kumar in Ganga Jamuna (1961), or Sunil Dutt in Mother India (1957) or the underwatched Mujhe Jeene Do (1963). The historical dacoit on whose life Sonchiriya builds its fictional tale, one Malkhan Singh, was one of the last of these admired baaghis, a hero in Chambal because of certain moral codes. As described recently by photographer Prashant Panjiar, who spent some months photographing him for a book in the early 1980s, “he wouldn’t drink or let his men drink, he was a champion of the poor and made temples, and his gang wouldn’t misbehave with women”. More recently, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s superb biopic of Paan Singh Tomar told the stranger-than-fiction tale of a man who is driven to the army by poverty, becomes a great sportsman, and then pushed by humiliation to turn against the state he once represented.

Sonchiriya, though, is more invested than Paan Singh Tomar in paying cinematic tribute to some of the classic tropes of the Western: most obviously, the revenge narrative with a wronged man in pursuit of others, and the damsels-in-distress who must be rescued along the way. What I found exciting, though, is that these fictional characters and tropes inhabit a fully realised Indian universe that feels sociologically and linguistically bang-on. The cyclical Gujjar-Thakur battles of the Chambal region, and the historical entry of the Mallahs, once a caste of boatmen, into the gang wars; an arid rural landscape whose harsh dusty expanses feel part of its unforgiving poverty; a feudal world where women are merely the currency of male honour, set off against a heartfelt belief in local goddess shrines: all these the film evokes, if sometimes only glancingly.

It is gloriously shot and lit, with set-pieces that range from a shootout on a lamp-lit Diwali night to a woman singing on a boat on the Chambal river, evoking an almost mythical sense of heroes in exile. The ravines are put to great strategic effect in the action scenes, but also help to make Maan Singh and his not-so-merry men appear like the lone survivors of a disappearing world. Mostly we see the men walking tall on the outcrops (a heroic sort of framing which, to be fair, the filmmaker makes self-conscious reference in another scene featuring the lighting of a beedi); it is only when we first encounter a woman that the camera lowers itself into a gorge.

That scene, in which Bhumi Pednekar’s Indumati pulls down her ghoonghat before aiming a gun at the strange men who have appeared above, was one of many that drew informed sniggers from a largely male audience in a South Delhi multiplex. “Jeth lage hai uska,” went the snarky response in this case, gesturing to the fact that North Indian upper caste women veil themselves before their husband’s elder brothers. Earlier, when the youthful Thakur ‘hero’ Lakhna (played, interestingly, by Sushant Singh Rajput), steps back in fear at something he sees, a voice from the back said loudly: “Ghabra gayo?”. “Rajput hai,” sniggered his companion. 

Not all the laughter was sociological: when a brilliant delivery of “Bhaiyon aur behenon” by Manoj Bajpayee lifted the film out of its Emergency era setting, the whole hall erupted in chuckles. But Chaubey’s humour can be too dark for his audience: when the final familial crisis unfolded under a sign for ‘Parivar Niyojan’, I might have been the only one laughing.

I have mixed feelings about the film’s use of little girls as symbols of curse and benediction. But it is in turning the landscape into a symbolic terrain that Sonchiriya achieves something haunting. Varun Grover’s lyrics for ‘Saanp Khavega’ use snakes, mice and vultures to conjure a bloody cycle of life, in which each species will meet its match. If the maggoty snake at the film's start foretells death, a fortuitous escape from a gharial is a sign of long life. But like the golden bird of the title, the Great Indian Bustard, freedom in the ravines is both threatened and elusive.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Mar, 2019.

Singing from the soul?

My Mirror column:

Gully Boy movingly fictionalises the lives of two real-life Mumbai rappers, but its insistence on authenticity masks as many contradictions as its characters 

In the opening scene of Gully Boy, the film’s protagonist Muraad (Ranveer Singh) is roped into stealing a car by his friend Moeen. It’s clear that Muraad isn’t too comfortable doing this, and yet he goes along for the ride, literally. The scene manages to do several things with superb economy. It marks, first and foremost, the thin line between the legal and illegal that these young men must straddle, a lakshman rekha where the temptations of stepping over are much greater than any benefits that might accrue from staying within. It also returns us to the risky lives of poor young Muslim men in Mumbai, exactly thirty years after Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), evoking an updated version of that youthful urban swag but avoiding the sense of real danger. Specifically, though, Zoya Akhtar’s achievement in the scene is to show us what really matters to Muraad: when the stolen car’s stereo starts playing some generic rap, he mocks the lyrics showing off girls and gaadis. Whoever listens to such “nakli rap” must be a “nakli aadmi”, the boys giggle, and in their heads the stealing of the car is now more than ok.

Given that Akhtar’s consummately crafted film is, after all, an appropriation of the lives and work of real-life Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, there is something audacious about Gully Boy’s frontal claim to authenticity. The unspoken message, in this scene and throughout the film, is that Muraad is asli, the real thing. Some of the most affecting lines in the film are built to bolster this truth-claim: “Teri kahani tere ko nahi bolni toh main kae ko boloon? (If you don’t want to tell your story, why should I tell it?)” MC Sher asks Muraad when he says he’s afraid to actually perform the poem he has written. Or later, before a crucial rap battle, when Muraad seems dejected by his poverty and what he sees as his lack of exposure, Sher tells him, “Tere paas kya hai tu woh dekh (What you have, you look at that)”.

Of course, this is tied to the idea of hip-hop as an autobiographical form, whose discomfiting of its audience draws on the authentic experience and unexpurgated language of African Americans from inner city backgrounds. As Sher tells Muraad in response to his “Comfortable nahi hoon main (I’m not comfortable)”, “Bhai duniya mein sab comfortable hote toh rap kaun banata? (If everyone in the world was comfortable, who would make rap?)”.

And yet Gully Boy itself shows us otherwise. Rap, like any other art form trying to succeed under conditions of late capitalism, must become comfortable receiving the patronage of the comfortably-off. So while the film shows how rap is enabled by the democratising possibilities of the internet, it also acknowledges that the music industry continues to have gatekeepers. Money matters, as does the influence of what Moeen once cuttingly refers to as “the English-talking gang”. A crucial character here is Sky (Kalki Koechlin), who is Indian but studies music in the US, with enough university funding to enable a posher studio set-up than anything Muraad and Sher can imagine. 

There is some symbolic power that Indian rappers can draw from hiphop’s international linkages. But while the film invites us to smirk along with Muraad when he shocks an American tourist by coolly reciting lyrics by the famous rapper on the tourist’s T-shirt, the fact is that Muraad actually lives in a Dharavi jhuggi that’s on the American’s Mumbai slum tour.

But what the film also offers is a clear-eyed vision of how no-one can be a single “asli” self, simply because social and economic and cultural pressures force most of us into inhabiting multiple universes. Muraad must cover over his distaste for his chauffeur father’s decision to marry a much younger second wife, literally playing his own soundtrack on his headphones to block out the traditional shehnai music whose maudlinness feels like a comment on his mother’s (Amruta Subhash) misery. Muraad’s long-time girlfriend Safina (Alia Bhatt) might want to be her authentic self with her loving but conservative father and mother, but she knows that telling them the truth about her desires will only result in them being scotched. So she keeps Muraad’s number on her phone labelled as “Mrs Ahmad” and uses the excuse of imaginary medical deliveries to sneak out and meet him.

Safina and Muraad’s perfectly choreographed romantic assignations, clandestinely conducted in the city’s most public places – trains, buses, bridges – are among the film’s unerring joys. As is the emotional landscape of their relationship, especially in the tear-inducing moment where Muraad explains her shaping influence on him to Sky: “Safina ke bina meri jindagi aisi jaise bachpan ke bina hi bada ho gaya (My life without Safina would be as if I’d just grown up without a childhood).”

Safina is both the aspiring doctor for whom career comes first and the girlfriend reckless enough to risk a police case to keep her man; the headscarf-wearing Muslim daughter and the girl rubbing rouge onto her cheeks on a railway platform. Muraad moves from being the white-shirted employee who must keep his mouth shut to the fit guy with two top buttons open, pouring his angst into a microphone. Like many films about artistic aspiration, Gully Boy seems certain that only one of these selves is the real one, the one worth celebrating. But perhaps it is the very fact of acknowledging multiple selves that keeps us asli. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Feb 2018.

A Dormant Volcano

My Mirror column:

Mrinal Sen's Chorus, 25 years after it was made, is a chilling reminder of how long India has spent making strides in the fake solutions department -- while letting the real problems fester.

Utpal Dutt in a still from Chorus 

Between 1970 and 1973, the late Mrinal Sen made three explicitly political films that together came to be known as the Calcutta Trilogy. Speaking to his biographer Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, Sen later said, “After Bhuvan Shome I found the smell of gunpowder in Calcutta's air something I could neither dismiss nor avoid.” Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik were almost documentary in their realism, with the Naxal-riven Calcutta of the 1970s brought to the screen with real footage of bomb blasts, firings and demonstrations.

Chorus, too, was concerned with the state of the nation, but it took a different aesthetic tack. Right from the opening scene, when Robi Ghosh appeared seated on a high white throne amid a circle of white-clad sages, it was clear that Sen had made a conscious departure from his previous work. Then Ghosh, already a recognisable comedian, broke into a kirtan, a Vaishnava-style devotional song, its deceptively genial rhythms carrying a chillingly sardonic message. “Once upon a time a king sat in his court and said to his wise men, show me a land where there is no want. Replied the pandits promptly, if there were no want, then there would be no God.” The song ends with the darkest line, “Abhaab rochen jini, tini shoktimaan [He who creates want, is the powerful one]”.

From this profound and cynical vision of religion and religiosity, we descend to another fictional milieu – a grand palace with a revolving surveillance camera atop it, within which a suited-booted man is handling two telephones in order to keep the crowd at the gates under control. As happens often in the Calcutta Trilogy films, words flash upon the screen. “SITUATIONS VACANT. USE PRESCRIBED FORMS TO APPLY. FORMS RS. 2”. 

Back inside the building, we hear the cigarette-holding executive in a tie and shirtsleeves calmly order large numbers of extra forms to be printed, “Accha, chakri dite na paren, form to dite paren [Accha, you may not have jobs to give, but you can give forms]... And we're earning money from them anyway.” Cut to Utpal Dutt, playing a senior bureaucrat in a Mrinal Sen film for the second time after Bhuvan Shome, though the tenor of the role could not be more different. He seems urbane and benevolent, even reasonable, until he is informed that the crowd is getting restive. Then the camera captures his shrieking transformation in ruthless close-up: “What is security doing? Control!” We hear the sound of marching boots in the distance, an effect that recurs through the film as a symbol of state repression.

Then we see a serpentine queue, in a white expanse outside what looks a lot like the Reserve Bank of India building, with a disembodied voice on the megaphone announcing that the counter will only open at the allocated time of 10am. A wave of disappointment runs through the queue. The murmurs are followed by a sarcastic commenter singling out an oldish gentleman for having lined up. The jostling spirals out of control. Grenades are thrown. The old man falls, his glasses crashing to the floor. The word “Attention” repeats on the megaphone, sounding more and more like “Tension”.

A journalist has appeared to capture the chaos, clicking away, even climbing up and down for better angles. What Sen produces here is an early cinematic indictment of the news media. The journalist witnesses the scene, never intervening. When a man in the queue asks if all law and order has been abandoned in the country, he replies casually: “There's a war on. How can there be law and order? This isn't a game of cricket, is it?”

He does record three different characters at the scene – the old man, a young rural man, and a young college-going woman -- whom the film then follows into the arenas of their individual lives, adapting the documentary form interestingly. The film has other threads running in parallel, all a little surreal. In one, a crafty village pradhan called Chhana Mondol manages to hide his corruption and his rice-smuggling from the powers-that-be, and tells his beholden job-seeking nephew to literally go underground. In another, a millworker called Mukherjee becomes a traitor to his union, drunkenly declaring that it is his administration now.

Meanwhile, having received 30,000 applications for 100 vacancies, the bureaucrats holed up in their fortress start to imagine a countrywide conspiracy to overthrow them. Utpal Dutt's character calls in the police, who randomly start to harass 150 of the job applicants. “We are seated on a volcano. We must do something to survive. But we need some kind of excuse, a provocation.” Dutt yells. “Why the hell don't they provoke us?”

The inspirations for Chorus were many, including an actual queue of over a thousand people Sen witnessed in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta. Sen's fantasy of a tyrannical state disconnected from a jobless people left even his regular audiences baffled, though it won several National Awards and prizes at Moscow and Berlin. In a truly remarkable instance of life imitating art, the Emergency was declared less than a year after Chorus released.

Sen was prescient. But nothing ended with the Emergency. Twenty-five years later, our queues of job seekers remain as desperate. Only the megaphones have grown louder.  

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Feb 2019

Living in the Ruins

My Mirror column:

Continuing her tribute to Mrinal Sen, our columnist writes about his rarely watched gem, Khandhar (1984).

Shabana Azmi in Mrinal Sen's Khandhar (1984)

Famine, as I wrote last week, was one of the recurring motifs of Mrinal Sen’s cinema. An even more ubiquitous image in his films was the ruins. Since most of Sen’s films drew on modern Bangla literature and were set in Bengal, it’s no surprise that the ruins were almost always those of a zamindar bari. These huge residential mansions that had represented the heights of feudal grandeur in the eighteenth or nineteenth century now dot the Bengal countryside, their colossal staircases and many-pillared verandas slowly crumbling into nothingness.

Sen’s first cinematic ruin was in Baishey Shravana (1960), where it serves as the film’s first marker of the cruelty of time. When his young wife (Madhabi Mukherjee) scampers out of their hut giggling, Priyanath follows her. He watches the spring go out of her step as she enters the ruins of the old family mansion. It is impossible to be anything but grave here, standing in the shadows of what they once were, what they will never be again.

In Akaler Sandhane (1980), the decrepit zamindar bari has managed to survive into the present — not as a home, but as a film set. Its ownership is farcically split among multiple descendants, who live all over the country. The only family members still on the premises are a middle-aged woman and her paralysed husband.

But it was with Khandhar (1984) that Sen really placed the ruin centre stage. Taking a classic Bangla story by Premendra Mitra called ‘Telenapota Abishkar’ (The Discovery of Telenapota), Sen adapted the atmospheric tale of three young men making a weekend visit to a ruined rural zamindari into the 1980s and into Hindi. Dipu (Pankaj Kapur) is the surviving scion who decides to bring two friends to see his crumbling ancestral home.

As in Akaler Sandhane, the city visitors treat the ruins as merely a picturesque setting. The dry, meditative Subhash (Naseeruddin Shah) is lured literally by the prospect of a ‘photographer’s paradise’, while the more talkative Anil (Annu Kapoor) is mainly happy to have a break from the city. The fact that real lives are lived here seems not to percolate into their consciousness; not even when Subhash has an awkward encounter with Dipu’s cousin Jamini (Shabana Azmi), an attractive young woman who is wasting away in the ruins.

Sole caretaker for her paralysed mother, the fine-featured Jamini remains unmarried, half-beginning to inhabit her mother’s delusional hopes about a Niranjan who was once betrothed to her. The figure of Jamini’s mother echoes the bedridden husband in Akaler, both also producing a doomed aura of clinging on to some pride from the past. Meanwhile, the unseen Niranjan, upon whose arrival all hopes seem to be pegged, brings Khandhar into synch with other Mrinal Sen films in which an important character is the subject of conversation for much of the running time but remains unseen: Chinu (Mamata Shankar) in Ek Din Pratidin, Professor Roy (Shriram Lagoo) in Ek Din Achanak, the servant boy Palan in the scathing Kharij.

Naseer’s photographer here is allied to Dhritiman Chatterjee as the filmmaker protagonist of Akaler, both figures making reference to Sen’s own observing, extractive artistic self. The camera is Subhash’s medium of communication with people, but it is also a shield against them: a boundary.

The photograph can be a memory created for the future. It can be a way of offering attention in the present. It can also be a way of enshrining the past — or enshrining the living as if they were dead. When Subhash decides to go along to Jamini’s house, the camera is his ticket. He’ll take a picture of the paralysed aunt, he tells Dipu: “You can use it to hang on the wall when she pops it.”

There is something about Khandhar that feels haunted, without the presence of anything supernatural. Unlike in the famous Tagore tale ‘Khudito Pashan’ (The Hungry Stones), in which a young man in another ruined palace became possessed by the spirit of an ancient dancing girl, the yearning spirit here is human, and very much alive.

And yet all the photographer/filmmaker can do is to frame her through the bars of a window, atop a terrace, or against a crumbling wall covered in cowpats. Whether he picks her out by the light of a torch or a camera, all he succeeds in illuminating for an instant is her loneliness. The ruins are inescapable. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Feb 2019.

Reeling in the Real

My Mirror column:

Twenty years after his Baishey Shravana, Mrinal Sen revisited the subject of famine with Akaler Sandhane, producing a fascinating film about films.

“Mrinal Sen was the lead player, in a shining cast of recipients for the national awards given away by the President Shri Neelam Sanjiva Reddy in the 28^th National Film Festival held in Delhi on April 23, 1981,” reads the 1981 film festival catalogue. The film that won Sen not just the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film but also the National Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay – as well as Best Editing for its editor Gangadhar Naskar – was called Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980).

It was Sen's second time making a film about famine. The first time was Baishey Shravana (1960), which I wrote about in the column before this one. Unlike Baishey, which was a period film set during the historical 1943 Bengal famine, Akaler Sandhane was set in the present. A modern film crew from the city arrives in a village to shoot a film about the 1943 famine, and finds itself embroiled in fractious local divisions.

When the film opens, it presents us with two worlds that seem equally generic, undifferentiated: a busload of shrill urbanites with little interest in the village beyond its use as a 'location', and a mass of villagers who look upon the arriving film crew with a mixture of awe and suspicion. As the crew spends time in the village, bridges are built between these worlds: the lapsed local folk actor who appoints himself the crew's caretaker and informant, or the film's heroine Smita (played by the late Smita Patil) establishing a personal connection with the last remaining occupants of the zamindar bari -- including the solitary lady of the house who watches the film crew at work, clearly a cinematic precursor to Kirron Kher's character in Rituparno Ghosh's Bariwali.

Sen's gentle, observational style manages to slowly unpack both sides. Yet the closer the interaction between them, the more the gulf seems to widen.

The film operates simultaneously at several levels. Deceptively unstructured in the way it seems to unfold, it moves constantly between the film-within-a-film; the interactions on the film set -- in which we have the sharp-shooting director (Dhritiman Chatterjee playing a version of himself), the flamboyant actor (Dipankar De, also playing a version of himself), two actresses and a production manager; and the village, into which we make sorties, usually with members of the film crew.

Several of these sorties make direct reference to the power of cinema in the world. The global reach of Hollywood is signalled in an amusing village-level advertising campaign for a local outdoor screening of Guns of Navarrone, said to star “the great actor Anthony Queen” and “the most beautiful woman in the world”. In another wonderful conversation, the local theatre actor says he's been told his face has a Russian cut, and also that he was so starved of good scripts that he had once sent to Calcutta for a copy of a book by (or perhaps about) Karl Marx.

At other times, Sen refers obliquely to his own previous film about the famine, such as with the opening shot of the train, or with the repeated sequence of Dipankar's character excitedly reporting the arrival of the military in the village. At a more philosophical level, too, Akaler Sandhane and Baishey Shravana share a preoccupation with how human beings react to the pressure of a calamity like famine: which values are suspended, who is allowed to suspend them, which things ought to be forgiven and which are not.

On the one hand, the film points out the irrationality of people's responses to performance: the villagers are attracted to the glamour and money of the cinema, but take offence when the village's women are asked to audition for the part of a prostitute. On the other, Sen's superbly understated direction nudges us to see the recurring parallels between the cinematic and the actual world. Akaler Sandhane contains not one but three handicapped/paralysed husbands, their emasculation by circumstances making them unfairly suspicious of their wives.

Misunderstandings grow rife, and as always, the supposed honour of women becomes the node around which insults begin to fly.

At one level, the filmmakers seem unable to communicate with the world in which they are filming, completely cut off from the social mores and power centres that govern the village. That distrust of the people is gestured to again and again by Sen, when he has film crew members say such things as “The public is erratic”, and ends by having the sage old village schoolmaster recommend that they finish shooting in a studio where “there will no fear of the people”.

But at another level, that breakdown of communication is precisely because of the unexpected resonances between the film and reality, which are so strong as to end up threatening the existing power structures of that reality. The film crew represent a privileged elite, yes – but the only reason they get under the villagers' skins is because the past their film digs up is too close for comfort for many members of the village. The reel is too real.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Feb 2019.